Is there evidence that phone polling led to people's votes being "outed"?

Question

It's well established that vote anonymity is an important part of representative democracy (discussed elsewhere on this site).

I was listening to the 538 podcast today, and they were discussing phone polling and specifically, how different countries have different measured levels of trust that people are willing to give when a person asks their political opinions and choices on the phone.

At which point, the idea occurred to me - someone can actually figure out who people voted for by using phone polling (either take a legitimate poll's individual level data dump - assuming they are dumb enough to store per-phone call data - or for the slightly more devious, take a phone directory that has names, call people pretending to be doing a legitimate poll, and instead simply record name, # and who they said they voted for/would vote for).

Question: did something like either of those 2 scenarios ever happen (that we know of?)

_{Related: Do any jurisdictions take steps to protect people's votes from being "outed" by the polls? . Please note that these aren't duplicates - one asks if this actually happened, the other asks if there are steps taken to prevent it from happening, whether it happened or not.}

Answer 1

If I'm understanding your question:

Can a pollster essentially identify who a person voted for by conducting a poll?

The answer is kind of but it's important to not equivocate ballot secrecy with self reported voting behaviour. I'll try to break it down, hoping I've correctly understood your question.

Do pollsters collect data on a particular individuals self reported voting behavior or intention?

Yes -- all the time. In fact, there are entire organizations that almost exclusively do this type of polling. They'll ask for a particular voter, matched to publicly available voter registration lists, and ask that voter who they voted for or if they intend on voting for particular candidates. They'll record that data on the individual level and produce a data product based on that. Nearly every major political campaign does this as well as part of a canvassing or field program.

Does this "out" or reveal how people voted, therefore compromising a voters right to ballot secrecy.

Absolutely not, the voter is not obligated to provide any information to the pollster, or even accurate information to the pollster and the pollster has no way of knowing how the voter actually voted. In fact, even if the voter gave a truthful accounting of who they intended to voter for on the day/time of the poll, opinions shift and change over time.

Think about it this way, if a pollster A) knew how a voter voted and B) had that information for a large sample size of people, would there be this much variability in polling accuracy?